We
review the concept and criteria proposed to measure
'internationality' in academic journals. We apply these
'internationality criteria' to RELIEVE (Electronic
Journal of Educational Research, Assessment and Evaluation).
The data reviewed show that RELIEVE is actually an international
journal.

As far as diffusion is
concerned, it should be noted that the purpose of any academic journal
is to serve as a means of communication to the community that it serves.
The greater this community, always in relative terms, the more chance
there is that the investigations that it publishes reach a wider
audience. There is also a greater chance that it will be useful to more
people and, where appropriate, it can be analyzed and criticized by more
colleagues. For this reason ¨domestic¨ journals, for example, are
published by a faculty, in which members of its teaching faculty and
committees whose editors mostly belong to the same school usually have
very little prestige and are little valued.

This context is where the
journal acquired the importance of an ´international´ aspect.
While one must never confuse the terms of internationality and
quality, opening a publication of a public (such as readers, authors
and publishers) as broad as possible is a certain guarantee of
transparency and influence in the community.

It should be noted that
there is no clear definition of what is an 'international' journal.
Searching the dictionary, we could learn that a journal is
international when it affects two or more nations. But such a definition
leaves too much in up the air: Does it refer to the two or more nations
as they relate to the readers, the writers, the research, or where the
journal is editted?.

As we can see, the meaning
of the internationality of a publication is somewhat diffuse, and does
not depend solely on a single criterion. As of recently, Buela-Casal and
his colleagues have been trying to develop and clarify this concept (Buela-Casal,
2001; Buela-Casal et al. 2006) by reviewing the various approaches
proposed in the literature. Some of them are easily disposable (such as
the inclusion of the word 'international' in the title or
possession of an Impact Factor calculated by the Journal Citation
Reports, which are anecdotal in that they add nothing about the
process or the product of the journal). Other deserve a more detailed
analysis, which we will then try to apply it to the magazine RELIEVE.

1. Language in
publishing

RELIEVE RELIEVE is a scholarly
publication that publishes articles interchangeably in both Spanish and
English, depending on how their respective owners write them. In recent
years, we have been making a great effort to post bilingual editions of
those articles that reach a wider distribution adding the translation
into another language. For this work we have benefited from the
invaluable collaboration of the staff of the University of Virginia[1].

Considering the percentage
of the world population that lives in countries that have these two
languages as official languages according to Gordon (2005), we can say
that we have as a potential audience some 890 million people who have
English (508 million) and Spanish (382 million ) as a first or second
language.

If we went back to the
definition of international ('two or more countries') we must point out
that English is the official language of 64 countries and Spanish is the
official language of the other 21 according to Gordon (2005). In other
words, the magazine relates to at least 85 countries. These data should
be added to the fact that English is the current 'lingua franca'
of science, and therefore its disposal in the academic community is even
greater.

2. Country of
Publication

The error of confusing
'international' with 'foreign' usually occurs frequently (Buela-Casal
et al. 2006), and thus there are quite a few institutions that were
more interested in a publication in, for example, a British or
North-American journal than in a Mexican, Argentine or Spanish journal.
In fact this is just a sample of certain 'cultural colonialism', and
certainly the country publication does not add, per se, any
quality to a journal.

In another instance, a
particular publication is simultaneously edited in or for many
countries. . It is evident that
this is the case of an electronic journal such as RELIEVE, given the
immediacy in disseminating and its ability to cross over boundaries.

3. Inclusion in
international databases

This approach, taken
independently, is problematic, since the emergence of a journal in a
particular database is that it does not make the publication
'international' overnight. .
However, the widespread dissemination of databases, particularly the
most prominent, can provide greater diffusion of the journal in a large
number of countries.

Therefore, although always
in conjunction with other criteria, the inclusion of a publication in
important databases and use in various countries can bring new readers
to the journal, so that it may indirectly contribute to
internationalization. In this sense RELIEVE is included, among other
databases and aggregators, in:

a. Google Scholar (in the
international and Hispanic version)

b. DOAJ (Directory of Open
Directory Journals - Sweden)

c. ERA (Educational Research
Abstracts - UK)

d. EBSCO databases (USA)

e. The selective Catálogo
Latindex (Mexico), which only accepts publications with the highest
standards of quality according to the famous Latindex criteria.

e-Revistas f. e-Revistas(Spain): The
database of open access journals CINDOC

h. IRESIE
(Index of Journals of Higher Education and Educational Research -
Mexico)

i. Ulrich's Periodicals
Directory

j. SOSIG (Social Science
Information Gateway - UK)

k. Other international indices
as Sociosite, ARL, ICAAP, NewJour, etc..

As we can see, there is
little doubt about the diffusion of RELIEVE in international databases,
although this is not a matter of all or nothing, but of gradation, and
there is still unfinished business ahead to further develop this
presence.

4. Affiliation to an
institution or international association

Direct or indirect
affiliation of a journal to an international institution raises a number
of questions. The first concerns the fact that the word 'international'
is very unclear when applied to associations as when applying it to the
journals, and in many cases (-2001) they only reflect the claims of
creators, more than describe their reality.

In any event, RELIEVE is
sponsored by AIDIPE (Interuniversity Association of Pedagogical
Research) which in turn is a founding member of EERA (European
Educational Research Association), the largest association of
educational research in Europe and which brings together a wide variety
of institutions of many countries.

5. Multinational
distribution of members of the Editorials Boards

The fact that people from
various countries contribute to the creation of the journal from the
editorial aspects (either in the selection, reviewing, or advising
phase) is a good sign, although not a guarantee, of the international
opening of the journal.

The limitations posed in
this approach have to do with the fact that possibly much of the names
that appear have an honorary or "embellishing" purpose (Buela-Casal,
2001). Even in those cases one would have to consider that which
represents the fact that the representatives of various countries agree
to endorse its name with a particular publication.

In the case of RELIEVE we
are pleased to have a Scientific Committee (which is responsible for
"analyzing the editorial policy, establishing its goals and evaluating
its performance") containing prestigious representatives from more than
half a dozen countries (United States, UK, France, Russia, Australia,
Spain).

6. Multinational
distribution of publishing partners

Buela-Casal et al.
(2006) considered this approach as
secondary and subordinate to the previous one, which subsumes in its
broadest sense. In addition, it may be the case, otherwise quite common
in our society and which also includes RELIEVE, that for the moment,
associate editors are not necessary because of the low complexity of the
editorial process.

7. Multinational
distribution of authors

This is probably the most
clear and most widely used in literature to analyze the internationality
of a journal. It is a good example of the opening of the editorial of
the journal, as well as a proof of the interest awakened among authors
of different nationalities.

RELIEVE can be proud to
have received (and in its case, published) articles from Spain, Mexico,
Argentina, Chile, Venezuela, Colombia, the United States, South Africa,
Brazil, Guatemala, Netherlands, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Turkey, Uruguay,
Portugal, Austria and Nigeria. It is, as can be seen, about a wide
variety of multinational interest in publishing in RELIEVE.

This approach can be
analysed not only from a qualitative perspective, but also
quantitatively, including in the latter case absolute and relative
approaches. Having made clear the internationality with regard to the
origin of the articles published in RELIEVE, we will reserve studies of
this type for later.

8. Multinational
distribution of users

S.
It is an approach that has traditionally been difficult to measure, so
there is little literature on this subject. However, one of the
advantages electronic journals offer (Aliaga and Suarez, 2002) is the
ability to gather information about the readers of the journal,
including each article. In the case of RELIEVE, we have data since
February 2003, provided by an external audit firm (webstats,
recently converted to motigo.com) that gives us data on the origin of
the visits, however, at the cost of an awkward publicity.

We can see in Table 1 that
the origin of visits to the homepage RELIEVE is concentrated mainly
along the entire American continent and Europe. This has been,
basically, our community goal since the birth of our publication.

TABLE 1 – Geographical zone
of the origin of visits to the homepage RELIEVE

In Table 2 we can see that
the origin of the visits to the homepage of RELIEVE focuses primarily on
Spanish-speaking countries, given the fact that Spain, the country of
origin of the journal, is not even the country that brings the most
visits. . The fact that 80% of
visits are from countries other than the creator is an indication of
further significance of the 'internationality' of RELIEVE.

It should also be noted
that there is a presence of a small, but not insignificant minority of
non-Spanish-speaking countries. Foremost among these United States
(Top Ten), but we cannot ignore the thousands of readers from
Portugal, Brazil, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, etc..

9. Patterns of
international collaboration

This criterion refers to
the existence (and where appropriate, number) of articles that are
written by authors from more than one country, as a demonstration of
international cooperation. This approach, however, depends not so much
on the focus of the journal as on patterns of international
collaboration that occur among researchers from a given area, in our
case education, so that the test does not relate precisely to the
characteristics of the journal. Abt (2007) has shown that the
proportions of international collaboration vary greatly from some
disciplines to others, so that it is nothing strange that the journals
that serve as organs of communication to the various specialties submit
results that are very different from one another.

Moreover, as the study of
Abt (2007) has also verified, those items that simultaneously affect
more than one country are more characteristic of studies that capture
international collaboration. However, the focus of our magazine,
education, has a marked social character, that is typical of each
society and country, when coming strongly determined by the relevant
laws, which makes it relatively far from conducive to international
cooperation. Zitt and Bassecoulard (2004) lists about 12 different
factors that can affect the level of international collaboration in
research and ranging from the existence of national policies, the
existence of associations or international meetings, the mobility of
researchers and a long list that has nothing to do with the editorial
policy of a magazine.

Still, varied examples of
articles published by authors from several countries can be found in
RELIEVE, some as early as 1998 (a collaboration between South Africa and
Spain) and the last, for now, in 2005, between a Spanish author and a
Dutch author.

10. Online access

The idea that the Internet
is the largest library in the world not to be repeated is less certain.
The possibility of being able to access information from virtually
anywhere in the world, at any time (anytime, anywhere) favours
the rapid and broad dissemination of ideas that appear in it, giving a
huge plus to the diffusion to the publications that use the internet as
means of dissemination.

For all the aforesaid
ideas, this is certainly the approach that is most suited to the
characteristics of RELIEVE since it was born with a vocation to use new
communication technologies, meaning the spread of the Internet.

Conclusion

From the above analysis we
proved that the concept of internationality of a publication is
not, as it might seem naively, a dichotomous concept, but rather it is a
continuum. This construct is multidimensional, and could not be properly
evaluated with a single approach. Instead, it requires a comprehensive
analysis of a number of elements.

We conducted, as a case
study, a detailed analysis in the case of the journal RELIEVE, having
been very clear that because of its characteristics, for the interest
aroused by its users (readers, authors, publishers) and its projection,
an international publication.

[1]
We would like to thank especially the cooperation of Michelle
Nguyen, Miguel Bacigalupe, Christine Parcells, Cristina Donoso,
Stephanie Lewis and Lauren Parnell, all members of the
Hispanic Studies Program at the University of Virginia

ABOUT THE AUTHORS / SOBRE
LOS AUTORES

Francisco M. Aliaga (Francisco.Aliaga@uv.es):
Professor at the Department of Diagnostic and Research Methods in
Education at the University of Valencia (Spain), whose address is
Avda. Blasco Ibáñez, 30.
Blasco Ibanez, 30. 46010-Valencia.
His main lines of work are "Internet
and Education" and "Research Methodology".The address of its Web site
iswww.uv.es/aliaga.
He was appointed Executive Director of RELIEVE in September 2001.
Find
other articles by this author in Google Scholar

Jesús M. Suárez Rodriguez (rodrigus@uv.es):
Professor at the Department of Diagnostic and Research Methods in
Education at the University of Valencia (Spain), whose address is
Avda. Blasco Ibáñez, 30.
Blasco Ibanez, 30. 46010-Valencia. .
His main lines of work are "Internet
and Education" and "Research Methodology". Appointed
Director of RELIEVE in September 2001. Find
other articles by this author in Google Scholar

We review the concept and criteria proposed to measure
'internationality' in academic journals. We apply these
'internationality criteria' to RELIEVE (Electronic
Journal of Educational Research, Assessment and Evaluation).
The data reviewed show that RELIEVE is actually an international
journal.